Q&A: Things that today are considered disgraceful…
Things that today are considered disgraceful…
Question
King Solomon brings Hiram [the Jew] to build, at the entrance to the House of the Lord, magnificent bronze pillars as well as the laver system. It’s described there in I Kings chapter 7 again and again with accompanying ornamentation and its reliefs… and this is in the holiest place for the Jewish people, visible to everyone. Today that isn’t acceptable. So were they deviants and we’re the normal ones? Or maybe the opposite: they were natural and we surrounded ourselves with manners and excessive modesty? After all, today in no synagogue would this be on the Holy Ark or on the bimah… Something about this is really confusing me [and probably not only me]. Can the Rabbi make order of this? Share an opinion on this puzzling thing?
Answer
I didn’t understand the first sentences. What did you see in I Kings 7? What is “accompanying ornamentation”?
If you mean sexual elements (as with the cherubs), then indeed there has been a change in standards of modesty over the generations. What is the problem with that? By the way, they too were covered from the public.
It seems the questioner is dealing with a display of wealth and is surprised by the presentation of material abundance in the Temple, unlike the homes of the great Lithuanian Torah sages, whose bed is a creaking wooden plank and whose food is dry bread with salt, and all their words are like fiery coals.